How much notice must a landlord give before entering in Vermont?

Verified July 12, 2026 All Vermont topics →

Check your municipality. Vermont does not preempt local rent regulation — city or county ordinances may impose rent caps, notice rules, and fee limits that are stricter than the state-level rules on this page and are not covered here. Verify your municipality's ordinances before relying on any figure below.

What the state record says

No rent control exists anywhere in Vermont — no statewide program and no municipal ordinance. Two notice-only overlays exist: (1) age-restricted housing (privately owned, not licensed as a long-term care or similar facility) requires written notice of any rent increase on a state form to the Department of Housing and Community Development AND all affected residents at least 60 days before the effective date, and an unnoticed increase is 'ineffective and unenforceable' (9 V.S.A. 4468a, effective 2024-06-17); (2) mobile home park LOT rents are a separate regime with their own 60-day state-form notice to the Commissioner and leaseholders, capital-improvement surcharge rules, and the same ineffective-if-unnoticed sanction (10 V.S.A. 6251 — lot rentals are excluded from chapter 137 by 4452(6)).

Vermont landlords must give at least 48 hours' notice before entering a rental unit and may enter only between 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. — one of the few states with both a fixed notice period and a statutory time-of-day window.

The 48-hour route covers four purposes: necessary inspections; necessary or agreed repairs, alterations, or improvements; supplying agreed services; and showing the unit to prospective or actual purchasers, mortgagees, tenants, workers, or contractors. Alternatively, the landlord may enter at any time with the tenant's consent, and the tenant may not unreasonably withhold it. Entry without either consent or notice is allowed only when the landlord reasonably believes there is imminent danger to any person or to property — a genuinely narrow emergency valve, with no broader 'impracticable' loophole. The notice does not have to be in writing: the statute asks for bare 'notice,' unlike the formally defined written 'actual notice' Vermont requires for rent increases and terminations, though written notice remains the provable choice. Lease clauses that cut back these protections are void under the chapter's anti-circumvention rule. One niche exception took effect July 1, 2026: employees of certified recovery residences may enter at reasonable times as needed to run the residence, notwithstanding the 48-hour rule.

Vermont entry notice at a glance

Advance notice required	2 days
Notice standard	Two lawful routes (9 V.S.A. 4460): (a) entry at any time with the tenant's consent, which 'shall not be unreasonably withheld'; or (b) unilateral entry 'between the hours of 9:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M. on no less than 48 hours' notice' for the four listed purposes. The statute requires 'notice,' not written notice — chapter 137 uses the defined written-notice term 'actual notice' elsewhere (4451(1)) and conspicuously does not use it here.
Permitted reasons	For notice-based entry: (1) when necessary to inspect the premises; (2) to make necessary or agreed repairs, alterations, or improvements; (3) to supply agreed services; or (4) to exhibit the dwelling unit to prospective or actual purchasers, mortgagees, tenants, workers, or contractors (4460(b)). Consent-based entry (consent not unreasonably withheld) is not purpose-limited.
Emergency exception	Yes
Time-of-day restrictions	Notice-based entry only between 9:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M. (4460(b)). No time window applies to consented entry or to emergency entry on a reasonable belief of imminent danger.

Notes and caveats

notice_hours encoded 48 — express statutory figure ('no less than 48 hours' notice,' 4460(b)), verbatim across both official reads (per-section page + full-chapter view); unchanged since enactment (1985, No. 175 (Adj. Sess.)). Render points: (1) TIME WINDOW is load-bearing: 9:00 AM-9:00 PM for notice-based entry — charts rendering VT as a bare '48-hour state' (or, worse, '24-hour') drop it; (2) notice need NOT be written — 4460 says 'notice' where the chapter's defined term 'actual notice' (4451(1)) means received WRITTEN notice; the drafters' word choice cuts against implying a writing requirement, flag for template builders; (3) consent route is separate and purpose-unlimited, but consent may not be unreasonably withheld — structurally like Alaska's consent-plus-notice design, except Vermont makes consent an ALTERNATIVE to notice rather than an additional requirement; (4) emergency valve is narrow: 'reasonable belief that there is imminent danger to any person or to property' — no URLTA-style 'impracticable' extension (contrast MT/SD/AK). No entry-specific remedy section exists; violations sound in general chapter/contract remedies, and 4454 voids lease carve-outs. NEW and easy to miss: 2026 Act 103 sec. 3 (eff. 2026-07-01) added 4452(b)(3) — 'Notwithstanding section 4460,' an employee of a certified recovery residence may enter at reasonable times as necessary to operate the residence; the same act CANCELLED the previously scheduled 2026-07-01 repeal of the whole recovery-residence subsection, so the statutes site's '(b) [Repealed.]' version note is stale — as of 2026-07-12 legislature.vermont.gov has not yet absorbed Act 103 (or Act 176's new 4468b, the cannabis lease-restriction section) — re-check at the next sweep. Farm-employee housing: 4460 is NOT among the sections disapplied by 4469a(h) (that carve-out covers 4455, 4461, 4467), so the entry rule applies there too.

Statute citations

9 V.S.A. § 4460 (a)-(c) Official source
9 V.S.A. § 4454 Official source
2026 Act 103 (S.157), Sec. 3 (amending 9 V.S.A. § 4452(b); recovery-residence entry carve-out, eff. 2026-07-01) Sec. 3, § 4452(b)(3) Official source

How this record was verified: Direct read of statute text on the official Vermont General Assembly site (legislature.vermont.gov): the complete text of every section of 9 V.S.A. chapter 137 (4451 through 4475, all four subchapters) read twice via two independent official endpoints — the per-section pages and the full-chapter view — with every load-bearing figure (60 days' actual notice for rent increases in 4455(b); the 14-day deposit return clock, its discovery/noticed-vacate-date triggers, the 60-day seasonal clock, and the forfeiture-plus-willful-double penalty in 4461(c)-(e); the 48-hour / 9 AM-9 PM entry rule in 4460(b); the three-day mail-receipt presumption in 4451(1)) matching verbatim across both reads. 10 V.S.A. 6251 and a full sweep of 10 V.S.A. chapter 153 (mobile home parks) read for the note-only lot-rent regime. Session sweep run against the official 2025-2026 biennium data: all 178 regular acts, all 12 municipal (charter) acts, and all 13 vetoed bills enumerated, plus the official Acts-Affecting-VSA-Sections table (2,693 rows) filtered to Title 9 chapter 137 — exactly three hits, each verified in the enacted act text (Act 69 of 2025 sec. 10 amending 4456a; Act 103 of 2026 amending 4452(b) and cancelling its scheduled repeal, effective 2026-07-01; Act 176 of 2026 sec. 30 adding new 9 V.S.A. 4468b, effective 2026-07-01). Act 103 and Act 176 read from their official As Enacted PDFs; both postdate the statutes site's current text (the site still shows 4452(b) as repealed effective 2026-07-01 and lacks 4468b — flagged in notes). Verified negatives (no deposit cap, no state deposit-interest or separate-account rule, no late-fee or grace-period statute, no rent-control or preemption provision, no increase-frequency limit) established by the full-chapter double read plus a targeted Title 24 municipal-powers check (24 V.S.A. 2291; chapter 123). Late-fee case law (Highgate Associates, Ltd. v. Merryfield, 157 Vt. 313 (1991)) corroborated via the statewide CVOEO tenant-landlord guidance and multiple independent secondary descriptions; advance.lexis.com not used. Dead 2025-2026 bills (S.91, H.399, H.440) verified dead on their official bill-status pages; the biennium has adjourned sine die.